The Simpire Strikes Back

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been playing The Sims 2 a lot recently. Like the original game, it combines taking a while to accomplish anything with an addictive quality, so it's hard to start playing it without being in it for the long haul. When I first started, I checked out the premade neighborhoods, and I noticed that one of them used some of the premade Sims from the original game, only 25 years later. Cassandra Goth is now grown up, and Bella has apparently disappeared. Incidentally, according to the family trees, Bella is Michael Bachelor's sister, which is kind of ironic, since bethje had them get married in her own game. But then, being able to define relationships, so the Sims don't try to hit on their brothers anymore, is one of the cool thing about the newer game. I didn't actually play any of the premade Sims, though, instead choosing to create my own neighborhood and people. I did take the idea of my child Sims from the first game having grown up, though. I have a tendency of linking my Sims to Oz books or other video games, so that they sometimes come across as weird crossover fiction or something. In my original game, I brought in Erdrick and Kandar from Dragon Warrior III, and Cecil and Rosa from Final Fantasy IV. This time, I brought back Erdrick's son, who's also Cecil's grandson, and is now married to a woman I intended to be a distant relative of Glinda's.

In addition to the relative-defining thing, some aspects of the game that I think are a definite improvement over the first one are:

• More interactions with objects. When I first started playing a family with a kid in it, she started jumping on one of the beds. There are also more meals you can make, and you can hook a video game system to the TV, and take bubble baths. There are still a lot of objects I haven't been able to purchase yet, so I'm hoping for some more surprises.
  
• It's easier to meet people. When I first started playing a new neighborhood, I thought I'd have to create a bunch of families so that there would be someone for my Sims to make friends with. As it turns out, though, premade Sims (sort of like the Townies from Hot Date or the other vacationing families in Vacation, I guess, although you don't have to go out to meet them) will occasionally show up on your lot. Kids will sometimes bring friends home from school, and you can now interact with non-player-controlled characters like the maid, the mailman, and the repairman.
  
• Along with that, there are more social interactions. It continues the Hot Date idea of sub-interactions (like different kinds of conversation, playing, hugs, and kisses), but the Sims don't seem to be as grumpy as they were in HD and later expansion packs for the original game. With HD installed, it seemed like all the Sims wanted to do most of the time was nag each other. They appear to be more eager to actually take part in the updated interactions in The Sims 2. There are also more adult-child interactions (adults can help kids with homework, or read to them), which is cool.
  
• I read on some reviews of the game that the Sims are no longer as dumb, and that does seem to be the case. For instance, it looks like they'll now actually wait for another Sim to get off the toilet before barging into the bathroom. That aspect of the original Sims game was always particularly annoying when guests would come over and all want to use the same bathroom at the same time, usually blocking each other's way out so that all they could do was stand around in the bathroom, basically at an impasse for about an hour of Sim-time.
  

Things that might take some getting used to include:

• The new house views. While the graphics are much improved, it's a little difficult to figure out how to get the right angles to see things properly, especially with the weird zooming.
  
• Figuring out how to build houses on sloping ground. I tried it once both with and without a foundation. One way I was unable to put a front door on the house, and the other they couldn't actually USE the door that I put on. I always found the sloping ground to be one of the most irritating aspects of the earlier game, and it's even worse this time around.
  
• Aging. While I like the idea, especially when it comes to the kids, it looks like it'll happen at a faster rate than I might have thought. So far, I've just had a kid grow into a teenager, but I'm hoping my adults will be able to be promoted to positions that make decent money before they die of old age. Also, since time only really passes in the house you're currently playing, that means that, if you play the same family for a while, a Sim's childhood friends are going to remain kids while that Sim grows old. That's kind of scary when you think about it. It's like those stories about someone going into a fairy mound, and emerging after a short stay to find that decades have passed in the real world, only in reverse.
  
• If I try to switch to another window and keep the game open (or, as sometimes happens, my computer automatically opens another window to tell me the virus scanner has updated or something), the game won't load properly when I switch back to it.
  

Speaking of video games, I had a dream a few nights ago that was in the style of a Square-Enix RPG. What I remember about it was that a king made a hero choose between several people with power items. The correct one turned out to be a guy who made a silly movie, because he used the right password. The Apollo Helm, which for some reason was shaped like a canoe, was involved, but I think the item given by the filmmaker was a necklace. A dream I had yesterday was also along sort of the same lines, although it mostly involved my walking around through an office building.